Which other languages do you work in? And if you do have similar proficiency in others, would you say that Ruby and similar languages (Elixir, Crystal, etc.) feel more pleasant, involve less friction, and hence are more productive? I'm particularly interested in comparing the web development experience. How does Rails compare to, for example, Django or Laravel, purely in terms of development experience?

Previously I worked with PHP. Elixir and Crystal are great candidates to learn.

When somebody asking me about good/best language, usually I'm saying that good developer should learn new language every year. Just be curious and open for new ideas.

Let's go deeper than frameworks names, they're all MVCs, so in every framework you'll have routes, controllers, views, business logic.
So what is the difference between them: language syntax, WTF/minute factor,
documentation(books), community etc.
Besides, you have Postgresql/Mysql for persistence, Redis for structure storage, caching etc.
Conclusion: language/framework itself is only a part of equation.

Rails is not hype anymore, but it's robust and I love working with it. It's developer friendly when you understand how Ruby OOP/metaprogramming works. Otherwise you may feel that everything works using black and white magick :)

Very true. People tend to get sucked into the scale hype too early and make poor decisions. I dabbled a little in Elixir a while back, and thought the language was very well done, so I surmise Ruby is a pleasure to write in. I've been doing PHP, mostly, and have tried Python and Django, but for me the best experience so far comes from Node and JS. Of course something like Crystal is mind-blowing.

So, here'a another question, as you mentioned you coded in PHP earlier. Did you give up PHP altogether? Are you an independent developer? If yes (to the latter), would you say the consulting ecosystem in Ruby has as many opportunities as PHP (or Node) has? I mean only Rails, by the way, comparing it to, say, Laravel and Node opportunities.

1) How did you learn Ruby and Rails?
2) Which feature (or features) of the language you like the most?
3) Have you made big applications or web pages?
4) What is your advice to all the rubyists who are learning or using the language?

1) learning by doing micro projects to explore some specific feature
2) Language and infrastructure (libraries, gems, tutorials) matters, not only language itself. Ruby has great readability, Rails has almost everything you need to start
3) Small and medium projects, I guess
4) (it's not mine advice) Read book and TYPE CODE, make micro projects, get through stuckness using Google and brain 😃

It happened after I listened/watched DHH's and Jason Fried's interviews, also reading Jason Weiss, Sandi Metz, Avdi Grimm and other guys.
I liked their mindset and started going deeper with concepts and way of thinking. Now I'm lazy developer who wants smart way of building software.
And I think using Rails framework — is the way I was looking for